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Dear Kari and Cameron,

First, Kari, my apologies for spelling your family name with too few letters.

Both these posts make good sense to me. I’m not arguing for the application of cliodynamics to design history. I was, rather, responding to the use of a cliodynamic example to say why it raised problems. In the course of the comment, I began to wonder whether one could make use of cliodynamics and what that might require. I took the example of a chair as a common designed artefact one might study – it could have been anything from a fork or a bicycle, or an object embedded in process such as a board game, or even a pure process such as the waiting line. In thinking about it, I realized that with a sufficient number of examples, one could learn something evolutionary that might yield valuable insights, much as cliodynamics promises to yield insights on human affairs.

It is the search for regularities that requires large data sets applying this method. I’m not making the case that one needs large data sets for all methods.

As Don Norman and Roberto Verganti (2012) demonstrate in their paper, a few well-chosen examples can yield valuable insights and conclusions. The principle of case study research demonstrates that on well-chosen case can be enough.

Karl Weick’s research clock metaphor is one way to explain it. The research clock has two hands with three possible positions, 12 o’clock, 4 o’clock, and 8 o’clock. These three points represent the general, the accurate, and the simple. Weick proposes that we can achieve two of these qualities in any one project, but not all three.

We can be general and accurate but not simple, accurate and simple but not general, or general and simple but not accurate. We can have accurate and simple theories if we do not insist on generality.

In seeking regularities across the historical flow of human affairs, Peter Turchin or Murray Gell-Mann seeks generality with accuracy. If cliodynamics delivers on the promise of helping us to understand the flow of history or make choices in public policy design, it will be extremely valuable even without complete predictive power (see Turchin 2008). For a researcher with the right skills, I’m speculating that cliodynamics applied well might yield valuable insights for design history. If we could draw regularities out of the design history of successful objects or processes, that would be a huge value. But one would need an appropriate data set and a rich range of methodological skills. Since I wouldn’t myself attempt to apply cliodynamics to design history, this was only a speculative thought responding to what I took as a proposal that we should use cliodynamics.

Some years ago, I heard a management professor describe his approach to understanding processes within organizations as a science of particularities. He saw organizations as ecologies, and some parts of the organizations he studied as micro-ecologies, much like the square meter of a rain forest that might be unlike any other in some respect.

What you are proposing is looking at systems closer to the single square meter of a rainforest. It will be different to any other square meter while teaching us something useful about more than itself.

At any rate, you are quite right to suggest that we can’t separate the artifacts we design from the processes in which we embed them through use. If there were to be a successful cliodynamics of design, I assume it would take use and human interaction into account. Again, though, I’m not making a case for cliodynamics in design history – I see it as useful background knowledge for people who want to understand things and how we use them even though we may not usefully know how to apply it yet.

In contrast, we can make very good use of the kinds of methods you describe, and we can use the kinds of approach that Don and Roberto take in their paper (Norman and Verganti 2012).

Apologies again, Kari, on dropping letters from your family name. And congratulations, Cameron, on your appointment as Director of Design Studies at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Design.

Warm regards,

Ken

References

Norman, Donald A., and Roberto Verganti. 2012. Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research versus Technology and Meaning Change.
Available at URL: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/incremental_and_radi.html

Turchin, Peter. 2008. Turchin Peter. 2008. “Arise ‘cliodynamics’.” Nature, 454: 34-35. Available at URL: http://cliodynamics.info/

Kari Kuutti wrote:

—snip—

Cooking up new metaphors is notoriusly unrewarding sport, but let’s give it a try anyway. A geologist is not interested in any particular hill, lake, gorge or bay (that would be a geographer!) just because of their locality and particularity; he or she is trying to understand the formation and transformation of earth’s uppermost crust over eons of time, and these are just unnecessary details in that picture. But to get any data to ruminate upon what may have been happened, the only possibility is to return to those local and particular hills, lakes, etc., because every one of them can give a witness account of what has happened to it over the course of time. True, these accounts are partial, biased anddistorted, but by collecting enough of them, some hypothesis can be formed, and from that on any new witness is no more selected arbitrarily, but due to its capability to bring more light to issues relevant to the hypothesis under development. The end result will be an explanatory account of a transformation process, supported by a sequence of material witnesses of particular hills, lakes etc., selected because of their capability to illustrate the existence of a certain phase in the process.

Metaphorically, something similar might happen with artifacts.

Artifacts are, however, half-muted witnesses; the further (geographically and historically) they are taken from practices they are used, the more feeble is their voice, and eventually it dies down. The museums around the world are full of artifacts nobody has a clue what for and how they were once used (the weasel word forthem is “cult objects”:-)). Artifacts reveal themselves fully only in human practices, and correspondingly they should not be studied separately.

—snip—

Cameron Tonkinwise wrote

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Elizabeth Shove and Mikka Pantzar nicely call things separated from their practices ‘fossils.’ Shove, Elizabeth and Pantzar, Mika (2005) Fossilisation. Ethnologia Europaea - Journal of European Ethnology, 35 (1-2). pp. 59-63

Elizabeth speculates in her contribution to _Time Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture_ (Berg, 2009) about “This possibility brings me to the fossilisation-innovation-transformation index (FITI), the third and final instrument in my imaginary tool-kit. Properly applied, the FITI gives a sense both of the rate at which practices are changing, and of the relativeplasticity or rigidity (lock-in) of the interlocking systems of practice ofwhich society is composed.”

—snip—